


I am

by Rumpels



Category: Original Work
Genre: Anorexia, Body Dysmorphic Disorder, Body Dysphoria, Body Positivity Challenge, Bulimia, Challenge Response, Community: HPFT, Eating Disorders, Swearing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-27
Updated: 2017-10-27
Packaged: 2019-01-25 03:24:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,214
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12521860
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rumpels/pseuds/Rumpels
Summary: Recovery is a long road. Loving myself will never come easy.*Eating disorder and body dysmorphia trigger warningsWritten for WindingAarow's Body Positive Challenge on HPFT





	I am

**Author's Note:**

> *Trigger warnings: eating disorders and correlated counterparts, bullying, body dysmorphia, anorexia, bulimia, and domestic abuse and violence.
> 
> **General warning: This is not a light-hearted story. Please take the advisories seriously. There's a lot of swearing in this one, sorry about that. I've fixed up the story the best I could, but with a strong influence from life, it's the way it needs to be told. This story is meant to be both informative and, ideally, inspirational to anybody suffering from an eating disorder. Everyone is beautiful. Everyone is worthwhile. Be kind to one another. Try seeing things from others perspectives and try to lend a kind ear or even some kind words to someone who is suffering.

I am Sadie White and I am all kinds of fucked up.

I'm standing in my therapist's office in front of that goddamn full-length mirror again. It's a torturous exercise, designed by the heartless and the malevolent for the sole purposes of inflicting pain on the already suffering. It was one of the worst forms of sadism that the masochistic mind could fabricate. It was a vacation to the deepest layers of Hell and there was no escape, no matter what Dante said.

Or that's what it felt like in the moment, at least. Looking back, I may have been exaggerating a little.

I had been officially diagnosed with body dysmorphia for the umpteenth time. Body dysmorphic disorder was a fancy way of saying that I was obsessed with fixing minor (or imaginary) flaws. Combine that with my cyclical need to starve myself (until I could no longer stand it, when I'd binge excessively and shove my fingers down my throat because I felt that that would be to my salvation), my anxiety, and a touch of depression and the result is me. One hot mess. One fucked up individual. One bad day from the deep end...or the deeper end.

As one small part of a long recovery road in therapy is standing in front of this mirror. Where I can see myself. All of myself. I could only be thankful that I hadn't been thrown into one of those 360 degree rigmaroles. I can only take so much humiliation in a single sitting. Anyway, I'm meant to state the things I like about myself.

It's a trap. If I say nothing, it means more therapy. If I say things, then Jenner, my therapist and more formally known as Doctor Hendrick Jenner, will ask me to explain why.

"Take your time," Jenner assures from his desk, tapping his stupid little grey mustache with his forefinger in thought.

Sadie versus the mirror, round three. Mirror 2: Sadie 0. Will this be the round where everything changes?

I glance in the mirror, trying to look past the blue of my sundress. I've found that not looking in the mirror altogether works best but, if I can't resist, looking at the outfit outside the person sometimes works, too. Well, in any scenario besides this one. This time, I had to actually look at myself. ALL of myself.

My eyes connect with the reflections and, naturally, that's the first thing I said. "My eyes. They're blue. I like blue." In all honesty, I wasn't a fan of my eyes. Dark circles and thinly-lined bags were a constant presence beneath them, making me look rundown and overused no matter how much sleep I got (though the night terrors might have a little something to do with that). One of my eyebrows drooped slightly lower than the other one, making my eyes look uneven. My eyebrows were too sparse.

"And?"

I grimace, unsure if he was asking me to continue about my eyes or to move on to the next thing that I "liked" about myself.

"They're azure like the sea--" where I can drown myself, "and sparkle in the sunlight. They help me see. They've been good to me."

"Sadie," Tanner says in a tone of both patience and warning. "What else?"

I chance a glance at him using the mirror, feeling uneasy as I watched him busily scribbling something down with that stupid ball-point pen of his.

Sighing, I return to myself. Going up from my eye area, my forehead I didn't particularly like or dislike. My hair was frizzy and poofy. If I didn't straighten it a little bit to take the body out, I looked like a suave gentleman from the early 90s, even when I managed to calm that frizz.  
Going down, one of my nostrils was perfect, and one of them was oddly shaped and thin. Then, of course, my lips were too small, my cheeks too round, my chin too large.

"My collarbone. I like my collarbone."

There it was, still visible, despite the weight gain from the antidepressants and mandatory eating. It was a reminder of success. Bones meant pretty to my screwed up head. Not that I can tell Jenner that. He'd just send me back to the hospital. I think. I don't really know what Jenner will do. I just want this exercise to be over with.

"Any reason in particular."

"I don't know."

He writes something else down. Fan-fucking-tastic. "Continue."

My shoulders are too broad, like a mans. No matter how much weight I'd lost, my shoulders were always too damn wide. My breasts are too small, to boot. All I've ever wanted to be was petite and feminine, but here I am, built like a goddamn man from my chest upwards.

"Here," I say, pointing to the thinnest part of my waist, right before it curved outward to my hips. "I like this curve." And for a second, I believe that. It was as I observed that area more that I realize that my ribcage was no longer as prominent through my skin, covered with meat now. Fat. I poke resentfully at it.

Hips are too wide, stomach is beginning to bulge as I pack the weight back on, thighs--don't even get me started on the thighs. The thigh gap is gone now. I've always hated this newly developed trend of the thigh gap. Hated, hated, hated it. However, thigh gap meant success. And now I was a failure. Any weight gain was failure. Any steps backwards was failure.

No, that's not right, I think to myself. It can't be failure. I'm succeeding. I'm getting better.

It's going to be a long road.

Thankfully, I was wearing my heels. Stilettos always gave my calves a boost so I could at least give Jenner one more thing about myself that I was okay with today, because beyond my calves were my too-large feet.

At least now I can look away from this mirror.

**

Jenner thinks that my body image issues, as well as a whole slew of my other issues, stem from my childhood. Go figure. A typical shrinky analysis, though I couldn't argue with him.

Ahh, my childhood. I can't even get into the deepest, darkest parts of my childhood without breaking into a psychotic breakdown that Jenner has to talk me back from. Happily, those deep dark memories get locked into a closet for the most part. Jenner likes to tackle the tasks that directly affect my body dysmorphia issues.

Like my stepfather, for example. Long-story-short, Mom and Dad got divorced when I was young, Mom met Chad and, eventually, married him. Chad was an asshole. Chad was an asshole to me and placed my younger brother on a pedestal. I was the dumb one (even though I worked my ass off to get A's in school to make my mother and grandparents proud of me); I was the lazy one (because I spent a great deal of my time in my room studying, and why would I want to come out of the sanctuary of my bedroom when every time I did I was in Chad's way, somehow); I was the fat one, the loud one, the annoying one. I was the unwanted one.

My mother. I don't really know, to be honest. My mother did everything for us as kids, except for argue with Chad. She always fucking took Chad's side.

And there was this thing he always did. Anytime he'd get mad at me for something--and that happened a lot because I was fat, stupid, lazy, and annoying--and I'd attempt to explain myself, he'd cut me off. He'd cut me off my screaming, "ARE YOU CALLING ME A LIAR?"

It didn't even make logical sense, half the time, but he was the adult, so what the hell was I supposed to do about it? When the cancer took him, I cried. I cried because my brother lost the only father-figure he knew. I cried because my mother was a widow. I cried with relief. I cried because I was so thankful he wouldn't be a part of my life anymore and I felt like such a fucking terrible person because of it.  
And it wasn't just because of the constant mental abuse. There was so much more to it. So much more to it that I can't even begin to start admitting to myself.

Anyway, Jenner thinks that a good portion of my body issues originated with fucking Chad.

**

Since traditional methods of therapy haven't been making as big of an impact on me as Jenner had initially hoped, he suggested I tried being a peer counselor for people in similar routes of therapy. While I thought that the idea was completely idiotic because who the hell was I to give advice, Jenner thought it would be good for me to see other people's stories.

My first meeting was with a 16-year-old. It reminded me of the first time I'd been to rehab for my eating disorders. Her name was Anna and she was struggling with anorexia. She was a dancer and aspired to do it professionally. She had big dreams.

"But the entire world is putting pressure on me," she admits. "I have to be small. I have to be tiny."

My heart sank as I listened. She was so pretty, with all that acorn-colored hair and big, green eyes. She's so thin, barely here. I wonder how she can still call herself heavy. "You'll have to be alive to be a dancer," I tell her quietly, feeling very much like a hypocrite.

"My coach took me aside last year. He told me that my weight was getting in the way of my talent--that I was too heavy to succeed. I had to lose the twenty pounds.

"But, I guess I took it a little too far. It didn't even become about the dancing anymore...it was just about dancing because it burned the calories...to lose the weight. I have to lose the weight."

But I don't think she has much more weight left to lose before she becomes air.

I worry about her when she leaves the room with a sad, sad smile.

The next was a woman who'd been suffering from various eating disorders for as long as she can remember, a story that is painfully familiar.

"I have a wardrobe that extends seven sizes," she says, teary-eyed. "My weight pinballs so often that I have to." Her most recent relapse was because of the weight she'd gained during her pregnancy two years ago and triggered by her husband's comments about still not being able to take the weight off.

"Don't you want to be a role model for your daughter?" I ask, grasping at straws for the crying woman to hold onto.

"I remember the first time I went down the road so badly as to end up in rehab," I tell her. "One of my boyfriend's friends always talked about how he hated ‘fat people'. He used to say that fat people should stop eating or skip some meals or something. He said that fat people disgust him."

My voice is choking me as the memories return. That guy was an asshole but he was an asshole that I'd let affect me when I was a teenager.

"It's not that simple!" the woman says, immediately jumping into defensive mode and suddenly I was crying along with her.

"I know," I tell her. "Trust me, I know it's not. Do you know what he told me one day? We were walking in the mall to head to a card tournament that one of the shops hosted with my boyfriend and a couple more of my friends. He pointed to a girl in a shop as we passed.

"He said, ‘She used to be pretty until she had a kid. Her body never bounced back.' Then he looked directly at me and told me to never have kids so that I wouldn't get fat.

"I don't know why but it sent spiraling into a really bad place for a long time."

The next is an overweight gentleman whose low-carb dieting for his type 1 diabetes got out of control.

"I'm so tired of being the butt of every fat joke," he tells me. "They don't get it. The guys...they call me a girl if I react to it, so I have to pretend to laugh while they make me feel like shit about myself."

My heart breaks.

Days turn into months of group sessions, peer counseling, individual therapy sessions, antidepressants, and food. With each new story, my mind is changing ever so slowly. I focus on being healthy and not skinny. I focus on feeling good physically and mentally. It's hard. It's an excruciating road. My love for others who can't see the beauty in themselves that I can see in them is making me realize that maybe I'm wrong about myself.

Maybe I am less flawed than I convince myself I am.

As a year circles around, I'm standing in front of that mirror again.

I am Sadie White and I am all kinds of fucked up.  
a survivor.  
worthwhile.  
getting better.  
beautiful.


End file.
